Think of a pun, and then try to write a poem where that pun is the last line. Think of everything you can that might lead up to that pun, and make a list. I make lists for lots of my poems. Don’t be discouraged if you can’t get it to work. Not every idea leads to a poem, and sometimes I give up on one pun and try another one.
Another example using this technique is my poem “Uncle Bungle.” A friend asked me, “What happens to a man who eats yeast and polish?” I said that I didn’t know. My friend said, “He rises and shines.”
I thought that was very clever and would make a good punch line at the end of a poem. This turned out to be a bit easier than writing the wolf poem, because I had extra facts—eating the yeast and eating the polish—that I could put into the body of the poem. Here’s the poem. I’ll let you decide whether or not it’s a good use of a pun.
pun: a joke that arises from the way a single word can mean different things in different situations, or from playing on how words that sound the same can have different meanings. An example of the first kind is the word seal, which can mean a substance that sticks two things together, or the cigar-shaped mammal that lives in the ocean. I used this pun in my poem “Please Remove Seal” in A Pizza the Size of the Sun. An example of the second kind would be the words toed, meaning “having toes”; towed, meaning “pulled”; and toad, a common amphibian that resembles a frog. I used the word towed instead of the word toed to create a pun in my poem “News Brief,” also in A Pizza the Size of the Sun.
A third kind of pun is one in which you substitute a completely unrelated word—having not the same sound but a similar sound—for the word you would expect to find. This is probably my favorite kind of pun. I think it’s the most fun to invent and is possibly the sort I use most often. In my poem “The Bunny Bus,” in It’s Raining Pigs & Noodles, I substitute the word rabbit for rapid, and in my poem “A Skunk Sat in a Courtroom,” in My Dog May Be a Genius, I substitute the word odor for order. In both cases, it’s the pun that delivers the punch line and makes the poem funny. You can find many more examples of this kind of pun in my books.